“HIDDEN KINGDOM Season One is a Five-part series that follows the lives of five different dancers living and hustling in New York City. Our pilot episode Kouadio follows our main character, a classically trained ballet dancer living in Harlem. Throughout the series we blend elements of the surreal with the intimacy of a diary, HIDDEN KINGDOM immerses the viewer in a visual landscape of movement and raw emotion: a body twists, a window becomes a portal, a curtain is lifted back to show us something new, or something familiar.” Directors Sunny Lee & Jacqueline Davis on HIDDEN KINGDOM which screens at SxSW 2022.
Welcome to SxSW and congratulations! Is this your first SxSW experience?
This our first time at SxSW, and we are super honored and delighted to be attending the festival in person!
How did you first hear about SxSW and wishing to send your project into the festival?
Both Jacqueline and I (Sunny) have attended the music festival here in Austin back in 2015. We always had known about the impressive roster of films and shorts that enter the festival, it’s been a dream of ours for many years to be participants of the film festival.
Tell me about the idea behind your project and getting it made!
Jacqueline and I were friends before we started making films together. Dance was the glue that brought us together. We both have a background in dance, and a deep mutual love for the art form. It felt natural for us to create a series centered around movement—Hidden Kingdom fuses a surreal and experimental way to share the stories of five different dancers, in very different walks of life. The project was self-funded in the very beginning but we were honored to receive a grant from the New York Foundation of the Arts to complete the project which we did in the midst of Covid. It did alter the original intent of the series – which is for the viewer to get a key into a unique community. But it was a challenge to navigate amidst the shutdown!
Who are some of your creative inspirations? Any particular filmmaking talent or movie that inspired you for this project?
Some major influences that added to our creative process of HIDDEN KINGDOM are Alma Har’el’s BOMBAY BEACH, the beautiful works of Shirin Neshat, Crystal Moselle’s Wolf Pack, Sergei Parajanov’s THE COLOR OF POMENGRANTES and Italo Calvino’s book INVISIBLE CITIES.
How did you put this together from a technical viewpoint? What sort of cameras/lenses did you use and/or did you have any creative challenges in making it?
If we had our way, we would have shot Hidden Kingdom entirely on 16mm film. Because of budget constraints we did resort to having to shoot about ⅓ on 16mm and rest of the series mostly on our Canon C300 Mark II. We also had some sparse shoots on a mini DV camera.
Most of the shooting was done with a shoulder rig. For a few specific scenes we did have a stabilization unit, which we shot with an easy rig set up to make use of dramatic scenes. Because most of it was run and gun and in the moment, we had to have a very stripped down camera rig that allowed us to be versatile and mobile.
If you had one piece of advice to offer someone to get their start as a creator or filmmaker in the industry, what would you suggest?
Stay true to your vision, get business savvy, do your research, cultivate your creativity in ways beyond just film, and remember that relationships are everything!
This film and many others like it will be showing at South By Southwest taking place March 11-20. For more information point your browser to www.sxsw.com!